


children of the sky

by nightbelle1130



Category: Ender Series - Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath, Ender's Jeesh, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-07 10:55:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4260678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightbelle1130/pseuds/nightbelle1130
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They never were comfortable in these skin masks of theirs after they returned. Never could peel away their Battle School selves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	children of the sky

They look to the sky that is dark, and there is only the moon. 

They cannot catch a glimpse of the place that they refused to call home, where they grew into something too old to be children in skins that looked so very young. And yet they stare at the sky, _do you remember_ ’s murmured under their breaths so that no one would reply. 

So they answer themselves, _of course, of course you do not remember us. Yet you are still the only thing we see when we close our eyes_. Because they are children of the sky, raised on stifling and artificial air. In the Battle Room where they pushed off from the walls and, if they kept still enough, drifted along. 

The sky does not answer them, does not send some meteor that they can call shooting star and make a wish to forget their not-home. Make a wish to stop their feet from dragging on the ground, limbs weighed down by this unchanging gravity. Make a wish to forget the language that the stars taught them, and to be able to call their native tongues just that without feeling like they’re lying. 

But _there’s an airplane, look, airplane_. And for now, that’ll do. 

So they close their eyes, press their hands across their face. They press until the bridge of their noses hurt. Then they point. “Star.” It’s not quite a shooting star, but that’s okay. 

They say, “Star,” even as it moves across the earthen sky at too-fast speeds and blinks out some morse code message. _Dot_ , _dot_. _Dot_ , _dot_. _Dot_ , _dot_. Maybe it’s trying to tell them something. _I_. _I_. _I_. 

But for now, they just wish and pray and plead. They’ve seen far too much of the sky not to be just a tad keen on backups, so they add, _and if that falls through, please don’t fall through, let us back into space. Let us find a new place to call ours and feel right about it. Let us be able to look into a stretch of the blue, blue sky and say ‘we’ll go there some day, and we’ll thrive’_. 

Then they open their eyes, start walking to the pub, and laugh over some inside joke. They’re not all technically supposed to be there, hand around a beer, but damn the rules. There really aren’t any in reality, just that the enemy gate is down. That’s useless, though. Battle school never did teach them how to live. Just how to win. 

Their star passes them overhead, and they are still trying, trying to let things go. Trying, trying to lose and be okay with that. So, their eyes trail the star and their feet carry them away. None of them speak. Staring at the sky and thinking, _that was ours once_.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this story having only read the Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, so there are probably some incongruencies with the other books in the series.
> 
> Also, for some background info that I didn’t quite know how to incorporate into “Children of the Sky”, the jeesh is at a reunion, which is why they are together. The Earth they live on has been polluted by the factories they used to provide weapons and stuff for the wars after the Third Invasion (the pollution was always a personal headcanon).


End file.
